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Comment by endominus | Hacker News Reader

"The government has the right to force people to take vaccines against their will for the sake of public safety." - Authoritarian Left

"The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left

"The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online." - Authoritarian Right

"Capitalism is good and works fine as is." - Libertarian Right (if that doesn't ping lib-right to you, maybe something about supporting skilled immigration by large companies)

Is it so hard to believe that one person can hold all of the above views?

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> "The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online."

Funny that I read this as AuthLeft coded (specific to Youtube suppression of Covid truthing). But obviously the alignment is just a function of whatever specific information is labelled "mis".

But in general: agreed, and this is a good list.

Agreed that as worded, this one is just "authoritarian". It seems on the "Right" at the moment because they're in power in the US (sort of), but it was "Left" only five years ago.

It's a fundamental problem of the political compass, since people's political beliefs are usually object-level or tribal rather than rooted in fundamental principles (for example, when their party controls the state congress but not the federal congress, they believe [ISSUE] is a matter of states' rights. When their party controls Washington but not the state legislature, they believe [ISSUE] is a Federal matter. I'm sure you've seen the studies).

I don't like the orthodox compass myself, and prefer the categorization system described in the blog Everything Studies here; https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-politica...

> "The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left

This classification depends on the aborted NOT being a person. If it’s a person then the libertarian position would be anti abortion because an abortion would maximally harm the individual liberty of that person.

I think a clearer example of lib/left is gay marriage or drug legalization.

Just as people pointed out that my misinformation line was also said by AuthLeft, gay marriage and drug legalization are both supported by LibRight (under the reasoning of government minimization). But that just speaks to the problem; the political compass tries to map stances to political groups that often believe things arbitrarily, rather than grounding their positions on peoples' perspectives and framework for understanding the world. That's why I like the other political compass I linked in the sibling thread; it's based more on a person's understanding of the world rather than tribal allegiance.

This is incorrect. Even if the fetus is a person, it has a right to individual liberty. It doesn’t have a right to another person’s body. If it can’t survive without someone else’s organs it’s right to survival doesn’t out weigh the hosts right to bodily autonomy. An easy comparison is organ donation. We don’t require organ donation from corpses (much less demand organs from living people who have a ‘spare’) even though a lack of available organs does limit the life/liberty of people who need them. The uterus is no different than a kidney. You don’t have the right to demand to use someone else’s organs even if your life depends on them.

>It doesn’t have a right to another person’s body.

It has a right to its body and 99.9% of the time its presence is due to the mothers decision making.

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